[Openicc] ALL YOU NEED IS A PROFILE, THE MYTH. (WAS CC Profiles In X Specification and dispwin)

[Robert Krawitz]

   Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:17:37 +0100
   From: "edmund ronald" <edmundronald at gmail.com>

   I think I need to put out a new topic explaining why PROFILES COME
   LAST.

   Profiles allow softproofing on screen. They allow simulation. They
   allow gamut mapping. BUT THEY COME LAST.

   The inkjet industry has been exposing "visible" profiles because
   they allow the above (softproofing, simulation, gamut mapping) when
   used with Photoshop. However in practice, the profile will only get
   decent results if the press or inkjet driver are already pretty
   well tuned to put down the right amount of ink on paper.

I agree quite vehemently with you, but I don't see anything that
Alastair wrote that contradicted it.  Good linearization is certainly
very important, but from the standpoint of engineering we can work on
all of these together.

   Before open-source people start to worry their heads about profiles
   they should first turn their attention to obtaing the same degree
   of cross-platform cross-application and time-invariant stability
   guaranteed by the native printer drivers.

Gutenprint already plays by these rules for stable releases -- we
don't keep retuning printers (at least Epson printers, which driver I
maintain) between stable releases.  We've done tweaks on occasion
where things were definitely wrong, but it's something we try to
avoid.

What I hope to get out of this is how we can do this initial tuning
and linearization correctly.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton